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Dessert

Drawn Butter

A simple butter sauce made by mixing butter and flour, then stirring into boiling water and seasoning with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and butter until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling water.

  3. Add coarse sea salt to taste.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter slightly, giving the sauce a light body.
Butter
Provides richness and a silky mouthfeel as the sauce's main fat.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter-flour mixture into the boiling water. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly, so the paste should be smooth first and then stirred in steadily to keep the sauce lump-free and evenly thickened.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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